


The Hawkeye Blues and Purples

by mharris



Category: Hawkeye (Comics), Marvel (Comics)
Genre: Gen, Healthy Relationships, Self-Indulgent, growing closer as people and partners
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-01
Updated: 2018-04-01
Packaged: 2019-04-16 21:20:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,336
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14173644
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mharris/pseuds/mharris
Summary: Some prose about Kate and Clint's relationship with each other and their shared name.





	The Hawkeye Blues and Purples

Kate takes her coffee white, and Clint takes his black, but they both take only one spoon of sugar. And before each other, Clint didn't use sugar, he'd just drink the strongest caffeinated sludge he could get his hands on, and Kate? Kate didn't even drink coffee at all. And they're not sure where along the way they started changing each other, but it's an unspoken bond between the two of them that they know they have irreparably effected the other's life.

There was a time, shortly after they first met and Clint took shoulder to their name and they shared it, that Kate was very on edge about who she was under that mantle _with_ him. She worried it and picked at it and carried her quiver like a chip on her shoulder for the longest time. That was before Clint introduced her to coffee and long before she introduced _him_ to _good_ coffee, and she had no one she felt comfortable talking to about it. None of the other Young Avengers had the same relationship with their namesake that she did, how were they to understand the weight that a name could have?

Eventually it was a worry that was replaced with others. Only once or twice was the side-kick, girl-version-of-Hawkeye idea ever brought into question. She never had proper opportunity to vent all her pent up emotions about it and in time, their importance diminished in the blinding light of how much she loved who she was.

She was Hawkeye. So was Clint Barton. And now it seemed so perfectly understandable.

Kate would have loved to tell the story about how she had always been drawn to the Hawkeye name and the bow, how it had glowed with a heavenly light when she picked it up that first night. How she _knew_ the bow was her destiny. But the truth was, the Hawkeye bow had come tumbling out of a cabinet she had taken Mockingbird's batons from. She decided to bring it with her just in case; the bow was secondary thought.

(Now days the bow was still a secondary thought, but in a different way.)

But after that night, most of her fights needed long range shots and she had the bow, so everyone _expected_ it of her. Then people started calling her Hawkeye, and she had gotten attached to the bow, and she didn't know how she had gotten herself in this position, she just _had_.

She'd mentioned all that to Clint with a forced-calm laugh one day, and Clint had told her he'd come to the bow the nearly the same. That was the first time he'd talked about being raised in a circus. The next day Kate bought a coffee pot.

Truth be told Clint hadn't really wanted to take the Hawkeye name up again.

"What changed your mind?" Kate prompted.

"You."

Kate was at his counter, leaning over a cup of _Yauco Selecto_. Clint had made a series of severely disapproving faces from the time Kate had brought her own half finished bag of whole beans through his front door, to the time she had pushed the freshly brewed cup under his nose. Kate couldn't figure if they were actually getting close or if the good coffee had loosened him up, but Clint rarely talked like this, so she didn't interrupt.

"I had expected some fool of a kid with something to prove to be shooting arrows at aliens. And that's what brought me back, really. I wasn't gonna use that bow, but I couldn't stand the thought of some hormone fueled teenager _mis_ using it. But then I met you," he waved a hand vaguely over her general area, "and you were… You were this young girl with enough spunk to fuel the tristate area."

"Spunk?" Kate asked.

"Fine," Clint laughed. " _Attitude_. You had all this attitude and a mean right hook. And you were a damn good shot."

Clint took another drink, this one deep and spurred a sigh at the end. "And I thought," he continued slowly, looking at his coffee, "that if someone like you had the name, then, well. I let you have that bow back because I thought you could do more good with the bow and the name than I ever did. I went in thinking I'd make you _earn_ it back, but when it came to it, _you_ weren't the one who needed to earn anything."

Kate made sure there was always a bag of the good stuff in his cabinets after that, and when he accused her of buying him ‘pretentious hipster coffee' she scoffed and said she refused to drink his crap.

When Clint brought a dog home, somehow he became _their dog_ just like _their name_ and _their bow_. And when Kate left for LA she took all three of those things with her because no one _let_ her have anything. Hawkeyes _took_ and _fought_ for what was theirs, Clint had taught her that, and Clint had forgotten that, so she _took it all back_.

Los Angeles had been warm and sticky like summer even when it wasn't. A permanent itch running its way down Kate's neck, and she wasn't sure if it was the sweat or if it was an old worry coming back to live under her skin. Because bone deep, Kate Bishop would always feel like she was too young and too inexperienced to belong under the name of Hawkeye.

But the truth of the matter was that Clint understood peace because he understood struggle. It was a knowledge brought through the fire of experience that he wished on no one else. Somedays he thought himself the fire, somedays he thought himself the extinguisher. And he'd spent years trying to define himself in that. But Clint will be the first to admit he'd never been all that good with words; Clint _fights_ because he's always been more tactile a person.

But Clint saw in Kate a fire that he admired, and without realizing, he understood that fire need not be destruction. That cold nights and hard times are made the better by a warm fire and a bright light, and Clint wanted to be _that_ more than he understood what he wanted at all. He understood it because he saw it reflected back at him on Kate's face. She wanted it too, whatever it was.

But _Kate_ was willing to fight for it. Even against Clint Barton himself. Because even in the beginning, she knew without really knowing, that Hawkeye wasn't just a name, it was a badge of honor. It was a goal to strive for. And Kate had lived with that chip on her shoulder because she thought everyone else just saw her as a kid with a bow, when she knew it was so much more. _She_ was so much more.

So he gave back the bow to Kate, because somehow Kate understood something he was still— and always constantly— trying to define. Because Kate had become a banner of everything he had wanted Hawkeye to be, and in some weird way, she had become something he wanted to become. Their roles had become blurred, and Clint learned as much as he taught, and Kate gave as much as she took, and somehow in all their mess, Kate Bishop and Clint Barton had both become Hawkeye, together, at once.

Clint knows that at one point, probably not long ago, his wardrobe was primarily black. It made things easier. But Kate's been back and gone and back again when he finds yet another purple shirt that she just wouldn't wear, so it must be his. He's got a nearly empty bag of expensive yuppie coffee, far too many purple shirts, and a couch covered in dog hair but an absent dog, and Clint Barton wouldn't trade any of it for anything. Because somewhere along the way they both became someone completely different, and became more like themselves at the exact same time.


End file.
